Amazon Synod: Who Cares?

About this sermon

Franciscan University of Steubenville graduate theology programs: https://franciscan.university/bh/ Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg of the Magnificat Institute. Find out more here: http://magnificatinstitute.org So for a little needed context, the Amazon Synod was a meeting of bishops and theologians to discuss the pastoral needs of people living in the Amazon region which includes multiple South American countries and hundreds of ethnic groups spread over a large area of land with many remote pockets. And some of the proposed solutions to be discussed were things like, ordaining married men within remote regions so that that the sacraments could be available to those people who are not easily accessed by the current shortage of priests. Now obviously, that’s going to be controversial proposal and there were others as well, but again, my first instinct is, what do I know about that region and its needs. If the bishops there think this is a good idea and Church law might allow for it, then why should I take much interest in it and it’s not like married clergy don’t exist elsewhere for specific reasons. But then I was reminded of a phenomenon in the Church that has been abused to bring about certain changes that should never have been normalized and this is the use of indults. Indults are special permissions granted to an individual or a group to do something outside of the norm or law of the Church. And this is a good thing because not all laws, practices, or norms can be universally applied. But the risk of abuse has been felt throughout the Church reaching all the way to my very own parish. And let me give you some examples of what I mean. Take something like communion in the hand. Previous to the now current practice, it was universal and normative that you would receive communion on the tongue. But in the wake of the second Vatican council, possibly emboldened by a sense that things were changing, several regions started to allow communion on the hand which there were no allowances for in the liturgy, which made this a liturgical abuse. With an awareness of that abuse Pope St. Paul VI called for a consultation to address the issue and from that consultation, a document called Memoriale Domini, and I know my Latin is terrible, but this recorded the results of that consultation which found that the bishops thought that communion in the hand should not be allowed, by quite an overwhelming vote. And by the way, I’d really encourage everyone to read that document especially if you’re not sure about why this even matters. It’s easy to treat something like this question as no big deal, but when you look at a document like this, you realize why it actually is. So, as a result of that, they decreed that in those regions in which the abuse was taking place, the bishops could ask for an indult which might be granted. As time went on and abuses become more widespread, the indults piled up and the abuse has now become the norm. In fact, it’s so normative, that in my parish, the overwhelming majority of people receive in the hand with no idea why they do or why they should do otherwise. Another example of this would be replacing the propers of the mass with hymns. This is something that was requested and refused by the consilium who wrote the new mass. They said that to do so would be to cheat the faithful of their rights. They insisted that we are supposed to sing the mass itself and the prayers that are proper to it, but indults changed that reality and this is why singing banal modern hymns are the norm instead of the actual prayers of the mass which are just set aside where I live. These kinds of special permissions granted to individual regions for specific purposes have been known to snowball and overwhelm faithful Catholics. So even though something may be proposed for an isolated case, we’ve seen, historically, how activists in the Church can wedge their way into those exceptions and use them to reshape the Church and her practices to their liking.